Just why at the age of 77 Jean decided to emigrate is a family mystery, perhaps one that will never be solved. However from the facts that have been discovered so far, I can be permitted to theorise.

Her youngest son, Henry Joseph Hampson named after his father, would appear to have emigrated sometime before 1879 to America. A record on the LDS IGI records that he married Coeilla Lindsay in Carleton, Dickson, Kansas, on 19 October 1879 (Source LDS - AFN:1B27-S1). The 1871 Census records that Henry Joseph, or Joseph as he is recorded, followed the trade of his brothers and worked as a miner. A miner's life in the UK, and especially in Scotland, at that period ws one of extreme hardship, and he may have felt that the "New World" offered a better chance for him.

He would have kept in contact, and perhaps through his letters, the family felt that America offered them all a better standard of living. Whatever the reason his mother, two brothers, a sister and her daughter made the hazardous journey to the new land.

Mary McMahon the Granddaughter would meet and marry William Elliot Cope. Their descendants would make their way north to Canada. A long way from Mary's roots in the small Lanarkshire village of Shotts, where she was born. William and Frank remained bachelors. Henry Joseph Hampson would continue the Hampson name.